A talk at the Blue Hill Library on Friday, August 9 at 6:30 pm will be given by Gail Darrell of Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF),a community rights & environmental organization. Gail will be speaking on “Nature Rights & Privatization” especially as it relates to Blue Hill Bay & Morgan Bay. Some information on the CELDF organization is included below. Contact Hugh Curran athugh.curran@umit.maine.edu if you would like further information.

CELDF was formed in 1995 in Pennsylvania by Thomas Linzey, Executive Director, and Stacey Schmader, Administrative Director, to provide free and affordable legal services to community groups. Over the first several years, we assisted hundreds of communities in Pennsylvania facing unwanted corporate development projects such as incinerators and quarries…Beginning in 1998, we began to assist communities to draft legally binding laws in which they asserted their right to self-govern. Initially, our work focused on communities facing corporate factory farms and later the application of sewage sludge to farmland. Communities across Pennsylvania adopted our anti-corporate farming and anti-corporate sludging laws.To accommodate the growing interest in our work, with calls coming in from across the country, we launched the Daniel Pennock Democracy Schools in 2003, which have become a critical tool in our grassroots organizing. Communities facing other corporate threats – such as uranium mining in Virginia and commercial water withdrawals in New England – began to take on this work. The Legal Defense Fundhas now become the principal advisor to activists, community groups, and municipal governments struggling to transition from merely regulating corporate harms to stopping those harms by asserting local, democratic control directly over corporations. We’ve now taught nearly 200 Democracy Schools across the country and over 100 communities have adoptedLegal Defense Fund-drafted ordinances.